


Sam and Wanda Go Camping

by FloriaTosca



Series: Self-Indulgent Post AoU Gen 'verse [5]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Banter, Desert Island, Gen, Jewish Maximoffs, Magical Accidents, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Pacific Northwest, Squirrels, Survival, a few Marvel 616 elements, deus ex maximoff, sam wilson and birds, sam's old pararescue skills, superhero battles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-22
Updated: 2016-05-22
Packaged: 2018-06-09 22:10:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6925288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FloriaTosca/pseuds/FloriaTosca
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wanda's attempt to get herself and Sam out of the way of an explosion during a battle leads to them being stranded on a desert island hundreds of miles away.  Fortunately, Sam was trained for this sort of thing.  And that's when things start getting really weird.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sam and Wanda Go Camping

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the hc_bingo prompt "Shipwrecked," although it did not, in the end, turn out to be a hurt/comfort story.

The sun was shining, the birds were chattering, and it was a beautiful day for the Avengers to fight a giant corn monster. Yes, a corn monster. Someone at Rappaccini Enterprises had a lot of explaining to do. Admittedly, Sam didn’t know much about farming on any scale larger than a community garden, but he couldn’t imagine how corn that got up and walked away would be commercially useful.

“Call me old fashioned, but I’m starting to miss the days when vegetables stayed in one place,” Steve said. 

“Yeah, what kind of mad science bullshit is this?” Sam replied over the comms. “What sort of people think it’s a good idea to make mobile, herbicide-resistant corn/kudzu/kraken… _things_?” 

“Evil cults,” Natasha replied. “‘In his fields in Iowa dread Cornthulhu waits dreaming.’”

“We are _not_ gonna call this thing ‘Cornthulhu,’” Rhodey protested. “This fight’s ridiculous enough.”

“How about Maizezilla?” Peter suggested. He was tagging along because schools in Queens were on spring break and he wanted more practice fighting monsters. Considering all the weird stuff that happened in New York nowadays, Sam thought the kid had a point, and animate corn plants were probably safer to practice on than sewer alligators.

“How about something that isn’t a goddamn corn pun.”

“You’re just bitter because your guns don’t work against it, old man,” said Pietro, who was zipping around shanking the little human-sized corn drones with a giant pruning knife he’d picked up. Pietro was exaggerating - the missiles and lasers had some effect, even if the monster seemed to shrug off bullets. But this would have been a really good time for War Machine to have a built-in flamethrower.

“I just hope Rappaccini isn’t another damn HYDRA offshoot,” said Bucky, who was perched on a silo with his sniper rifle. Bucky didn’t go on a lot of Avengers missions, but fighting animate vegetables wasn’t the sort of thing that was likely to trigger his Winter Soldier programming. “Some of the HYDRA biologists had a real thing for cephalopods. Pierce had a couple of them reassigned to some island off the coast of Antarctica after they tried to give me color-changing camouflage skin without authorization.” There was a brief moment of silence over the comms. Sam was glad that Bucky was getting more comfortable talking about his past, but damn.

“Vision! Any luck?” Steve asked. Vision, Rhodey, and Wanda were making surprisingly slow progress battling Cornthulhu while Sam, Steve, Pietro, and Natasha fought the little corn drones. Peter’s webs and Bucky’s rifle took out any drones that tried to make a break for it. 

“I’ve made contact with the local extension service, Captain,” Vision said calmly, while he zapped Cornthulhu with an energy beam and neatly sidestepped a flailing tentacle-stem in midair. “After I explained our situation they were most forthcoming about the habits of corn. They mentioned high nitrogen and water requirements.”

“Okay, nitrogen and water, that explains why it settled down in a pond full of manure runoff,” Steve said. “Any suggestions for what else would be tasty to this thing?”

“The agent mentioned fish meal and chicken manure, Captain,” Vision said.

“Thanks. Falcon, is the big parking lot next to the ballpark clear?”

Sam jetted upward and activated the long-distance mode on his goggles. “It’s deserted, Cap.” 

“All right. Here’s the plan: fliers, make a fertilizer breadcrumb trail to lure this thing to the ballpark. Bucky and Black Widow, get the Quinjet. Everybody else, keep the drones contained and take out as many as you can. When Cornthulhu gets to the parking lot, everybody stay clear and we’ll blast this thing with the Quinjet.”

“How much blasting do you want, Captain?” Natasha asked.

“However much it takes. But start with the lighter weapons. We don’t want to put a crater in these nice people’s parking lot if we don’t have to. Any questions?”

The local hardware and feed store was shut down for the current emergency, but the fenced garden center out back had lots of bagged fertilizer and soil amendments. It also had a couple of corn drones slamming against the latched gate, but Wanda quickly turned them to silage with her telekinesis. It would have been really disturbing if she’d done it to something that could bleed.

Sam scribbled a quick “thanks for the fertilizer” note with the Avengers’ and Rappaccini Enterprises’ contact info and slid it under the store’s barricaded back door. It never hurt to be polite. 

Wanda, who had been remained unphased by the walking hostile cornstalks, looked around at the labyrinth filled with mosses, mulches, manures and jugs of mysterious liquids with a kind of bewildered exhaustion. “Where do we _start_?” 

“You ever done any gardening?” Sam asked.

“No, but I thought we were trying to kill these plants, not encourage them,” Wanda said impatiently.

“But we need nitrogen to lure them out,” Sam said. “You know how to read a fertilizer package?” Wanda shook her head. Sam grabbed a box of tomato food off a shelf. “Fertilizer always has the levels of the main nutrients listed in the same order, and nitrogen, which is what we’re interested in, is the number on the far left. Got that?” Wanda nodded and darted off.

A fifty pound bag of fishmeal can be awkward to carry while flying even if the weight itself isn’t a problem - and taking off with your arms full and weighed down is worse. Especially if you’re wearing power armor. It turns out that steering the War Machine suit in tight quarters is harder if you can’t use the hand jets.

“Tony doesn’t hear about this,” Rhodey muttered over the comms after his takeoff knocked over a stack of bagged beauty bark. Once he was properly in the air he had an easier time of it, and he was out of sight and back again while Sam was still at the runoff pond with his load of lawn food.

“Falcon, War Machine, sitrep?” Steve asked when he caught sight of both men.

“Operation Breadcrumb is under way, Captain,” Sam said.

“Since you weren’t real specific about how you wanted the breadcrumbs laid out, and I’m the fastest person on the team-” Sam heard pointed throat-clearing noises over the comms that he was pretty sure belonged to Pietro - “okay, fastest _flier_ on the team, I started laying the trail at the ballpark. Rest of you go from here, and we can meet in the middle,” said Rhodey.

“Sounds good,” said Steve. “Let’s get on with it.”

Sam finished making his trail of lawn food out to the road - now he had to get the corn-beast’s attention and convince the thing to take an interest in the new treats. He unzipped his last bag of powdered lawn food, added a splash from one of his water bottles to turn the powder into more of a paste, poked a few holes in the heavy plastic with one of his combat knives, resealed the bag, and lobbed it at the monster from a safe distance. Cornthulhu didn’t immediately notice the bag, since it was preoccupied trying to grab Pietro and get a solid hit in on Steve. But something clicked, and the creature grabbed the bag in a rooty-looking tentacle, stuck its tendrils through the holes Sam had so considerately poked, and squeezed. The hairy little rootlets sucked up the fertilizer goo in a way that should have resulted in slurping noises but didn’t. Sam knew that most normal plants got root burn from straight fertilizer, but most normal plants didn’t get up on their own and terrorize small country towns.

By the time Sam got back to the garden center, Rhodey and Wanda had worked out a system: Rhodey stayed in the air and Wanda flung the bags of fertilizer up to him with her telekinesis. With Rhodey and Wanda working together, and Sam and Vision laying the near end of the trail, work went fast, and apart from a few marauding drones who tried to suck up the bait before it could lure the big guy out, smoothly. Sam should’ve known something would come up.

It started when Sam was heading back to the garden center and noticed Pietro battling some drones that were trying to tear up an old Cadillac. Why the hell animate corn plants would care about something so inorganic, Sam had no idea. Maybe the nitrogen-enriched gasoline smelled edible. Maybe Cornthulhu was more intelligent than anybody had thought and wanted to build itself some armor. But there they were, and Pietro was trying to take three of them on at once with his fists and pruning knife. Sam flew in with a long swooping dive and kicked one of the drones straight onto the car’s protruding tailfin, which bought Pietro a chance to clean the fibers and plant gunk off his knife. “Man,” said Sam. “Those fins are hazardous.”

“I had it handled,” Pietro said. Pietro had been holding his own as far as not getting hit went, but the drones’ sturdy, fibrous bodies did not suit his fighting style. He did better once his knife was clean and could properly cut through the drone’s stalks, but that was when things started getting really weird.

Before, all the corn monsters had been hard to kill because of their lack of blood and vital organs, but the little guys hadn’t been starfish. You cut or blew off a chunk and it just sat there. But these drones seemed to be an even more annoyingly persistent upgraded version, and the dismembered parts kept wiggling. “Now that’s just wrong,” Sam said. “Vegetables should not wiggle.” Especially not vegetables detached from the parent plant. One particularly persistent chunk of stem managed more than that, and wound itself around Sam’s calf and ankle while Sam was helping Pietro make sure that the drones were not going to come back up again. Sam only noticed this once he was in the air, and as he flew back to the garden center, he hoped Wanda’s telekinetic control was precise enough that she could pulp this thing without filling his lower leg with corn shrapnel. 

As Sam landed in the garden center, he felt a sharp poking pain behind his knee, and noticed that the corn tentacle had insinuated itself under Sam’s leg armor and was trying to pierce Sam’s combat pants and skin with a cluster of sharp little rootlets. “Vampire corn monsters?” Sam said. “C’mon now. Who the hell decided the world needed vampire corn monsters?”

“We have stories of vampire pumpkins in Sokovia,” Wanda said. “Would you like me to get that thing off you?”

“I’d appreciate it. We’d better do it out here,” Sam said, gesturing to the more open space around him. “The drone this came off of had some gas splashed on it and it might be flammable.” Wanda nodded in acknowledgement, walked out next to him, and enclosed the vampire corn tentacle in a glowing red bubble of psychic energy. The tentacle put up a surprising fight for a piece of disembodied plant matter, but it was no match for Wanda’s powers. Wanda bore down to crush the thing, but instead of cooperatively disintegrating, the damn piece of mutant cornstalk went off like some kind of organic IED.

Sam had barely registered “oh shit” and moved to grab Wanda and dive for cover when he felt the grip of Wanda’s powers and the world around him went red. Sam felt the ground drop away beneath him, his ears popped, and when his vision cleared, he and Wanda were ankle-deep in cold water, the sunny midwestern afternoon had become a partly cloudy late morning, the visual display in his goggles had gone off-line, and instead of the stink of fertilizer and the sweet vegetable smell of cornstalks, his nostrils were filled with the scent of seaweed and salt air. “Wanda?” Sam said, after he’d caught his breath, “Where are we?”

Wanda pushed her hair out of her face, looked around, looked at Sam, and shrugged. “I have no idea. Canada?”

It wasn’t a bad guess. They appeared to be somewhere on the West Coast, and probably to the north of where they’d just come from, judging by the angle of the sun. “Maybe. Or Northwest Washington. There’s lots of islands near the border.” Sam had done survival training at Fairchild and spent some time stationed at McChord, so the Northwest wasn’t new territory.

Sam and Wanda trudged to the shore, which was a stretch of sandy-mud beach liberally scattered with pebbles and bits of crushed shell. Not exactly photogenic, but better for foraging than those pretty stretches of pure sand. Sam didn’t notice any signs of human pollution or algae blooms, which was another point in the beach’s favor in terms of foraging prospects. If it came to that. Maybe their teammates would be there to pick them up in a couple of hours and all he and Wanda had to do in the meantime was avoid being eaten by sharks.

“So,” Sam said casually, “how long have you been able to teleport?”

“I didn’t know I could,” Wanda said. “At least, not with people. I’ve been practicing with small objects.”

“So I take it you didn’t do this on purpose,” Sam said.

“No,” Wanda said. “I was just trying to move us out of the way of the blast. Nothing fancy.”

“You realize how that’d sound to someone who wasn’t a superhero,” Sam said. Wanda cracked a faint smile. 

When the two of them reached a giant piece of driftwood that looked like most of a tree, Sam took off his wing pack, rested it on the trunk to keep it out of the sand, and leaned back gratefully. Wanda took off her boots and began wringing seawater out of her socks. “You got your phone?” Sam asked.

“Yes,” Wanda said. She took it out of her coat pocket and frowned. “But it’s dead.”

“Figures. So are my goggles. They’ll probably reboot eventually. Stark tech’s pretty sturdy.”

“How long is ‘eventually’?” Wanda asked dubiously.

“Long enough that I think we’ll both be a lot happier if we do some work now instead of putting it off until we know we’ll need it.” Wanda nodded slightly and looked resigned. “Have you ever gone camping?” Sam asked.

“A few times,” Wanda said. “When it wasn’t more dangerous in the countryside than in the city.”

“That’s something,” said Sam. “Cap never visited any place wilder than Central Park until he joined the army.” 

“It’s so strange,” Wanda said thoughtfully, “knowing him as a real person and not a propaganda character.” Wanda paused and meditatively dug her bare toes into the sand. “It must be harder for you.”

“Not really,” said Sam. “I was never quite as invested in Captain-America-The-Legend as a lot of military guys are. More into the Tuskegee Airmen, myself. I think that made it easier. And it’s hard to put a guy on too much of a pedestal when he keeps trolling you with his superior jogging powers.”

“Convenient.” Wanda set her socks to dry on the fallen tree and looked out over the beach. “What do we do first? Look for fresh water?”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “Nobody wants to hang around waiting for a seep to fill up when they’re already dehydrated.” Sam looked over his wingpack, tried to wake up the electronics enough to run test diagnostics, and frowned. “Are your powers still working?”

Wanda waved her hand gracefully and it glowed with flickering red energy. “My powers are fine.”

“Glad to hear it. My wings are still offline. Could you get some altitude and get the lay of the land?”

“Of course,” Wanda said. She jetted off in a blast of red light without even putting her boots and socks back on. But Sam supposed that if she was flying she didn’t really need them.

While Wanda was exploring, Sam found a sunlit spot above the high tide line and started digging a hole for a solar still. With the tiny collapsible shovel in his first aid/survival kit, it was not fast work, but it still beat having to use a clamshell or his hands. Being the Avengers’ field medic had real advantages at a time like this.

By the time Wanda came back, Sam had finished digging the hole, set the biggest collapsible cup from his survival kit in the center, and begun lining it with seaweed. “What on earth are you doing?” Wanda asked.

“Making a still.”

Wanda looked puzzled. “I am going to assume this is some kind of special survival term and has nothing to do with making slivovitz.”

“Yes and no. It’s for water. You put a sheet of clear plastic on top, the hole heats up, the water vapor evaporates out of all this seaweed, it hits the plastic sheet, condenses, drips down into a container, and you’ve got pure water.” Wanda looked dubious.

“Have you ever successfully done this?”

“As a matter of fact I have,” Sam said. “Air Force survival training. ‘Course, Fairchild’s inland, so I wasn’t using seaweed, but it’s the same principle.”

“If you say so. Do you want any help?”

“Sure, I could use some more seaweed. Preferably wet. Try to knock the little crabs and stuff out before you lay it down.”

Wanda rolled up the cuffs of her pants, jetted over a stretch of barnacle-mined pebbles, and landed on a spot of muddier but less hazardous wet sand, surrounded by washed-up sea lettuce. Sam was satisfied that she could take it from there and went back to working on the still. Sam looked up when he heard nearby footsteps crunching on some broken shells. There was Wanda, holding a bundle of seaweed big enough to fill a small laundry basket, wadded together and tied up in ribbons of glowing red energy like a poorly wrapped Christmas present. Wanda looked down at the still in progress and then back at her bundle of seaweed. “Did I get too much?” she asked.

Sam made some mental calculations. “Maybe. But even if you did, it won’t go to waste. Lots of kinds of seaweed are edible if they’re fresh enough. Which reminds me,” Sam continued, “I know you and your brother don’t keep _kosher_ -kosher, but you guys don’t do pork. How do you feel about shellfish?”

“The issue never came up,” Wanda said. “Sokovia is a landlocked country, and HYDRA did not treat its test subjects to lobster dinners.” She paused thoughtfully. “I think _pikuach nefesh_ \- that’s the ‘it’s okay to bend the rules when it helps someone avoid dying’ principle - applies when you’re stranded on a desert island.”

“That makes things a hell of a lot easier,” Sam said. “Unless you had your heart set on finding out what pit-barbecued seagull tastes like.”

“Wouldn’t that be cannibalism?” Wanda asked innocently. 

Sam wanted to go full Bird Nerd and tell Wanda about the dietary habits of real peregrine falcons, but that would only encourage her. So he rolled his eyes and went back to arranging the wet seaweed around the interior of the still. They did wind up having a little more than they probably needed, so Sam set aside the freshest sea lettuce for cooking. He sprinkled some sea water over the seaweed for a little extra moisture, put the plastic sheet - actually an experimental polymer Stark had been working on - over the pit, anchored it, and set a little rock in the middle right above the cup. Then he sat back to admire his handiwork.

“You are done with that?” Wanda asked.

“For now, yeah.”

“Want to hear about my trip?”

“Of course.”

“The island is bigger than a football stadium-” Sam wondered if she meant soccer or American football, but he supposed that wasn’t really relevant to the current situation “but smaller than the grounds around the Avengers base. The interior looks like someone cut off a mountaintop and stuck it in the middle of the ocean. It was hard to get a good close look at the landscape because there were so many trees in the way.”

“What kind of trees?” Sam asked.

“I saw the twisty ones with the big flat leaves all around the coastline,” Wanda said. “Like that one.” She pointed to a madrona. “This side of the island is mostly evergreens. Over the hills in the middle of the island, there are more leafy trees. I think they might be some kind of oak. I am not a botanist.”

“I think we can work with that,” Sam said unenthusiastically.

“You were hoping for an abandoned apple orchard?” Wanda teased.

“Would have been nice, if it wasn’t way too early in the year,” Sam said. “Any sign of fresh water?”

“Maybe?” Wanda said. “I didn’t see any springs, but I saw a patch of those big grass things that look like sausages on sticks - I don’t know their English name. Those grow in water, don’t they?”

“Cattails, and yeah, they do. They’re also good to eat, if we get sick of clams.”

“You were planning on staying here that long, Robinson Crusoe?” Wanda said. “And I almost forgot. One more little thing that might be of interest. You know. If you’re into that sort of thing.” Wanda paused significantly.

Sam took the hint. “Yeah? What’s that?”

“We. Are not. Alone.”

 _Wanda, you little drama queen_. “What exactly did you see?” Sam figured it couldn’t have been an obvious HYDRA or AIM outpost or Wanda would have let him know right away.

“There is a little clearing on the other side of the island, in the oak forest,” Wanda said. “Someone’s set up a camp there, with a tent and a burned-out campfire and a couple of solar panels.”

“How many people?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see anyone. The tent was big enough for at least two people - maybe three or four if they squish? But I only saw one chair.”

“Any insignia?”

“Nothing important,” Wanda said. “Unless Coleman is really the code name of some covert ops group.”

“Any weapons?”

“Nothing visible from the air.”

Sam pondered this new information. “So we’re either dealing with covert operatives who actually know how to be stealthy for once, disguised as a harmless camping trip - or an actual harmless camping trip.” And with the way Sam’s life had been going since that fateful DC morning jog, either option was about equally likely.

“Or they could be normal criminals,” Wanda pointed out. 

“Could be,” Sam said. “Although this is pretty far out of the way for a hidden drug lab. Could be smugglers.” Sam shrugged. “Did you see any boats?”

“No.”

“Weirder and weirder.” Sam shook his head. “Okay, time for an executive decision. How hungry are you versus how urgent is it that we find out who’s camping out on our island before they know we’re here?”

“What does the food have to do with it?” Wanda asked.

“You ever do any pit cooking in Sokovia?” Sam asked. Wanda shook her head. “A clambake doesn’t involve roasting geoducks over an open fire like marshmallows. You need the fire to burn down to coals before you can start cooking, and that takes time. But if our friends on the other side of the island are keeping an eye out, they could see the smoke.”

“I see.” Wanda paused and looked thoughtful. “I want to find out who is here as soon as possible,” she said. “But not if it ruins your survival plans.” Well would you look at that. Wanda really had grown up since the Ultron clusterfuck.

Sam looked out at the shore and did some mental calculations. “The tide’s still going out,” he said. “ We’ve got a few hours before the water gets too high for clam digging. Plenty of time if we don’t get lost.”

“I think we can manage that,” Wanda said dryly.

“One more thing before we head out,” Sam said. “Do you know what poison ivy looks like?”

Wanda shook her head. “I don’t think we even had that in Sokovia.”

Sam took a little notepad and StarkStylus™ (like a mechanical pencil, but flashier and made with Science!) out of his survival kit and drew a few quick sketches of western poison ivy and poison oak. “Here you go. Don’t touch any of this.” Wait a minute. Sam remembered one of his hikes with Steve the city boy to a HYDRA base in the Cascades when they were looking for Bucky. “You guys have nettles in Sokovia, right?”

“We do, and I know what they look like. Unless American nettles are different.”

“I think American nettles are pretty standard,” Sam said. “Unless nettles in Sokovia _aren’t_ fifteen feet tall with eagles nesting in the tops.”

“Very funny. Can we go now that you know I won’t blunder into any killer plants?”

“Sounds good.” Wanda put her socks and boots on while Sam pondered whether he should bring his guns or not. He decided yes. Sam hoped he wouldn’t have to use them, but he felt like he had to be prepared here. Since he’d joined the Avengers - hell, since he’d met Steve - Sam’s life had a tendency to get uncomfortably interesting in all kinds of unpredictable ways, and Sam did not want to be taking on an island of robot Nazi dinosaurs or whatever the hell was lurking in the interior with just a pocket knife. Sam covered his wings with another of Stark’s experimental mini-tarps and they set off.

The island didn’t have any real trails, or even deer tracks, so Sam and Wanda followed the path of the cattail-laden stream inland. Despite the hilly terrain and the slightly squishy wet ground, they made it to the other side of the island in good time.

Sam and Wanda were walking through a little clearing amid the oak trees when Sam noticed something. “Wanda!” he stage-whispered. “Listen.”

Wanda stopped and held very still for a moment, then looked at Sam with a confused and mildly annoyed expression. “I don’t hear anything. Is this some soldier thing?”

“Birder thing, actually,” Sam said. 

Light dawned. “If I don’t hear anything, then what happened to the birds?” Wanda said.

“You got it. Something’s going on here. Keep your eyes open.”

Sam and Wanda were almost all the way across the clearing when Sam noticed a flash of movement from something way too big to be a gull or a rabbit at the edge of his peripheral vision. “Wanda!” Sam hissed, as his hand automatically went to his holster.

Then the squirrels descended. Sam and Wanda were covered with dozens of little furry creatures crawling all over them and making it impossible to draw a weapon, concentrate, or even see what the hell was going on. It was like something out of Hitchcock, only cuter. Then Sam heard a rustle of branches, a soft thud, and then what sounded like a human making chittering noises. The squirrels all turned their heads toward the source of the noise and listened for a moment, then jumped off Sam and Wanda and scampered back to the trees.

Sam and Wanda turned toward the source of the noise and saw a young woman - a little younger than Wanda, maybe college age? - with a chubby squirrel wearing a cat collar perched on her shoulder. She appeared to be doing some kind of furry cosplay, since she was wearing a brown fuzzy sweater and leggings, an animal-ear headband, and a very well-made and realistic fluffy squirrel tail. 

“Hi!” the young woman said as she walked toward Sam and Wanda. “Wow, Falcon and Scarlet Witch! Are you here on Avengers business? If you are, can I help?” As Sam watched her, it became clear that her tail could move on its own - it was either some kind of fancy custom cybernetic prosthetic or part of her actual body, but not just a costume prop. 

“It’s kinda complicated,” Sam said.

“Who are you?” asked Wanda. “Some kind of squirrel girl?”

“That’s me!” mystery girl said cheerfully. “I’m Doreen Green, the one and only Squirrel Girl, and this is Tippy-Toe.”

“Please tell me HYDRA wasn’t making squirrel chimeras,” Wanda said.

Doreen looked offended. “Excuse me! This is all natural.”

“Glad to hear it,” Sam said. “And there is something you can help us with. You got any way to contact the mainland?”

“Sure!” Doreen said. “Reception isn’t very good out here, but you can get a decent signal if you go to the top of the hill and climb that big Douglas Fir.”

“That’s… good to know,” Sam said. “You got a phone or a radio or something we can borrow if our phones are still fried?”

“No problem!”

Sam reached into his pocket to check his phone, and found that his phone had disappeared. As had his guns, his combat knife, and even his notepad and StarkStylus. 

“You teach your squirrels to do that, or are they just a bunch of fuzzy little kleptomaniacs?” Sam asked.

Doreen awkwardly scuffed her feet a little. “Well… I’ve been trying to train them to disarm people, but squirrels don’t really understand the concept of ‘weapons.’ The smarter ones understand ‘sharp,’ like claws and teeth, but they don’t get what makes a handgun more dangerous than a smartphone.”

Wanda listened to Doreen’s explanation with surprising equanimity. Wanda had grown up in a wartorn country; maybe teaching the local wildlife to disarm potential attackers made perfect sense to her. All she asked was “Have you taught them to give things back yet?”

“We’re working on it.” Doreen turned to the treetops and made a short speech in chirps and chitters. The branches began to rustle, and a minute later, a flying squirrel carrying Sam’s StarkStylus in its teeth landed on Doreen’s shoulder and chittered at her.

“Rocky says the big stuff’s coming, but it’s going to take longer,” Doreen said. “Your guns are probably going to need more than one squirrel each.”

Sam winced at the thought of loaded guns being shoved around by fuzzy woodland creatures with no grasp of firearms safety. “Maybe you should go get those,” Sam said. “You know, for safety reasons. You know how to tell if the safety’s on?”

“Sure! No problem,” Doreen said, and darted off toward the trees. Sam sighed and shook his head. He’d accumulated his share of “wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t been there” stories in the military, but it had nothing on being a superhero.

“This isn’t even the strangest thing to happen to us today,” Wanda said.

“Ain’t that the truth.”

Within a few minutes, the contents of Sam and Wanda’s pockets had accumulated in a small pile on the ground in front of them, along with a few weatherworn tchotchkes that they did not recognize, which had probably been left behind by previous visitors to the island. Doreen brought up the rear carrying Sam’s guns carefully.

“Thanks,” Sam said. He picked up his phone, which had woken up. “You want to do the honors, Wanda?”

Wanda shook her head. “Pietro knows I am okay,” Wanda said. “I can still feel him in the back of my head. If anything bad happened to me, he would know. The Captain is probably more worried about you.”

“And you’re absolutely sure you’re not saying that because you don’t want to have to climb a tree in a corset?” Sam teased.

“Who said anything about climbing?” Wanda retorted. “I can fly.”

“Wait?” Doreen said. “You mean you guys aren’t here on purpose?”

“Teleportation accident while fighting corn monsters,” Sam said. 

“Squirrels eat corn,” Doreen said hopefully.

“The fight’s probably over by now, but we’ll keep you in mind if we ever fight more of those things and we’re on the West Coast,” Sam said.

“Why don’t I fill our new friend in while you call the Captain,” Wanda said. “You know how he worries.” Having been friends with Steve during the time between the fall of SHIELD and Bucky’s return, Steve certainly did - and with more firsthand experience than Wanda had. Sam grabbed his phone and trekked off toward the highest point of the island while Wanda explained the Avengers’ battle against Cornthulhu.

Steve answered fast, even for him. “Sam! My god, where _are_ you? Pietro said that Wanda was okay, but we had no idea where you were or even if you were together. We thought you might be in _space_ before your phones came back online. We were ready to call Doctor Foster. Is anyone hurt?”

“Wanda’s with me. Everybody’s okay, just a little shaken up. Far as I can tell, we’re on a little island somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. I’m thinking the San Juans. No signs of permanent habitation.”

“So, no top secret lab facilities?” Steve asked.

“Not unless they’re hidden really well.”

“No out of place tropical jungle filled with dinosaurs and giant apes?”

“It’s mostly temperate coniferous forest, as far as I know. More deciduous on the dry side.”

“No secret lairs?”

“They’d have to be underground.”

“That’s… unexpected,” Steve said. 

“Tell me about it,” said Sam. “Who gets caught in a teleportation accident and sent to a perfectly normal, ecologically appropriate island?”

“I don’t know, Sam,” Steve said. “But I’m sure Wanda was glad to have you.”

“Damn right. Better than all you city kids.”

“Sam, you grew up in Harlem,” Steve said.

“You do not want to start that with me, Steve,” Sam teased. “Remember the Mount Adams mission?”

“Of course,” Steve said solemnly. “Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it, and I do _not_ want to go through that again.” Steve paused, and continued in a more normal tone “What’s the layout of the island like? Is there room to land a Quinjet?”

Sam looked down from his treetop perch and did some mental calculations. “There is, but takeoffs and landings are gonna be tight,” Sam said. “There’s a couple of little clearings that could work, but most of the island’s forest, beach, or diagonal.”

“We’ve managed under worse conditions,” Steve said cheerfully. “Would you and Wanda be okay on your island for the next couple hours? We’re almost wrapped up here, but Peter needs to be home in time for dinner, and unfortunately, you’re in the opposite direction from New York.”

“I think we can handle it,” Sam said. 

Steve didn’t immediately reply, and Sam heard him talking to someone else, indistinctly. “Sorry, Sam,” Steve said. “Pietro just wanted me to tell you that if any harm has come to Wanda he will make you into _paprikash_.”

How, exactly, did Pietro think Sam had a chance against anything that would give Wanda serious trouble? Maybe this was like Steve’s weird protectiveness toward Bucky, never mind that Barnes was a big strong de-brainwashed super soldier. Sam supposed “complete lack of chill” was just some people’s natural love language. “Since when does Pietro know how to cook?”

Steve chuckled. “I didn’t ask.” Sam overheard more talking in the background on Steve’s end. “I have to go now, Sam. The mayor and someone from Rappaccini want to talk to me.”

“Go do your leader stuff. ‘Bye, Steve.”

“Goodbye, Sam.” Steve hung up, and Sam stowed his phone and climbed down from his perch. When he got back to the clearing, Wanda and Doreen were still talking.

“So you guys are here because you got caught in a magical accident?” Doreen asked.

“I don’t know if what I do is technically magic, but yes,” Wanda said. “I was trying to move us away from the explosion and we went too far.”

“But you know what that means,” Doreen said, her fluffy tail quivering with excitement.

“That we are very lucky we did not land in the middle of the ocean or at the North Pole?”

“Okay, yeah, technically, but that’s not the point I was going to make! Origin stories! Do you know how many people get powers from scientific and occult accidents?”

“But I already have powers,” Wanda said.

“Yeah, but Falcon doesn’t,” Doreen said. “He’s like happier bird Batman.” Doreen turned to Sam, waved, and said “What do you think you’ll get? Falcon powers?”

“Hey, hey,” Sam said. “Aren’t we getting a little ahead of ourselves? Maybe a teleportation accident is just gonna be a teleportation accident this time.” Sam hoped so. Falcon powers _sounded_ cool, but he already had flight and super distance vision with his gear, and he knew enough about physics to know that actual wings-attached-to-his-body big enough to let a guy his size fly would be getting in the way all the time when he was on the ground. 

Doreen shrugged, with a little flick of her tail. “Maybe. But I think it helps to be mentally prepared for this sort of thing, y’know.”

Sam couldn’t argue with that, so he left Wanda and Doreen to their conversation and continued exploring the island. Sam couldn’t name what he was looking for, since things like foraging and water sources were irrelevant when you were going to leave in a couple of hours, but he liked knowing his surroundings. It was the principle of the thing.

When Sam got closer to the beach he noticed that the cries of the seagulls seemed louder and more obtrusive than usual. He looked out to sea to find out if anything was bothering the birds, but it all seemed to be business as usual. But even when Sam had been on the beach long enough that he’d started to tune out the crashing of the waves, those seagulls would not be ignored. “What the hell do you guys want, anyway?” Sam grumbled to a squawking young gull running along the sand. The bird stopped to look right at him, cackled, and bounded off.

Sam had made a circuit of the beach and started walking inland again when a crow began yelling at him. Sam told himself not to be ridiculous, it was just a wild social animal sounding the alarm when a human came around. But it sure sounded to Sam like the crow was yelling at him. Which kind of made sense, corvids didn’t like raptors much. “Dammit,” Sam said, glad that he was the only human present, “I get enough bird jokes from the other Avengers. Don’t _you_ start.” The crow cocked its head, croaked in what Sam would have sworn was barely-concealed surprise, picked up a fir cone in its beak, flew over, and dropped it at Sam’s feet. The hell? “Thanks, I guess,” Sam said. “Apology accepted?” The crow croaked approvingly and flew off. Man, this day was getting weirder and weirder. Fortunately, the chickadees and LBBs were preoccupied with their own small bird drama and left him alone.

When Sam had packed his still and gear up and returned to the clearing, Wanda and Doreen were deep into a discussion about Doreen’s theory about the origins of animal-themed superpowers and the relative attractions of the Black Panther and a local vigilante who went by Chipmunk Hunk. (Sam had never met this Chipmunk Hunk person, but he’d have to be pretty impressive to even think about competing in Black Panther’s league. T’Challa’s _eyelashes_ had their own internet fanclub.) The forest birds were still being unusually noisy and obtrusive, but it was easier to ignore with actual human conversation to listen to.

Doreen was in the middle of telling Wanda a story about her dust-up against Deadpool - wait, was this the “Miss Pool” Bucky was friends with? - when Sam and Wanda’s text alerts went off at the same time. It was Steve. The Quinjet’s ETA was five minutes away.

“Looks like our ride’s almost here,” Sam said. “Do you need a lift to the mainland?” he asked Doreen. 

“No thanks,” Doreen said. “I’ve got plenty of supplies. I think I’m gonna stay here a few more days and do some more training. But when the Avengers get here, could I get a picture with everyone? Please?”

“You’ll have to ask them,” Sam said. “But it shouldn’t be a problem.”

The Avengers landed the Quinjet in the unoccupied clearing without incident, although the edges of the wings got some tree sap and fir needles stuck to them. Pietro ran up to Wanda like they were being reunited after he’d spent two years overseas instead of an afternoon on the other side of the country, tripped over a tree root hidden under the leaf litter, and would have landed majestically on his face if he hadn’t been saved at the last second by Bucky. Wanda cracked up like the devoted sister she was.

After Pietro stopped hopping around the clearing cussing in Sokovian (turns out stubbing your toe at superhuman speeds _hurts_ ), Doreen and the Avengers lined up for a picture. Bucky was kind of camera-shy due to the Winter Soldier still being a wanted terrorist in some jurisdictions, so he volunteered to be the photographer.

As Wanda and Doreen were saying goodbye and exchanging contact info, and Sam was loading his gear into the Quinjet, a crow cawed at him. Not the crow from earlier, a younger, ruder one, cawing the equivalent of “good riddance, asshole.”

 _Rude_ , Sam thought, before he realized the implication. _What the hell? Looks like Doreen was right_.

**Author's Note:**

> "Rocky" is a reference to Rocky the Flying Squirrel from the old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons.


End file.
